U-26 (Type IA ocean-going UBoat)

[Grey Havoc]

The U-26 (not to be confused with the later Type XXVI project) has recently been in the news in an indirect and odd way:

ORIGINAL CAPTION: Naval artist Claus Bergen’s 1937 painting of a U-boat in heavy seas, Wiedererstanden, U-26, was once owned by Hitler Credit: German Art Gallery

Among the works he advertised as previously owned by the German Führer was naval artist Claus Bergen’s 1937 painting of a U-boat in heavy seas, Wiedererstanden, U-26, which Hitler bought for 4,000 Reichsmark to hang in Speer’s New Reich Chancellery. It is listed for sale at $310,000 – “a bargain”, according to Martens.

The German Art Gallery website bears out Martens’s stated interest in art history. It contains detailed biographies of around 150 artists, compiled at a cost of more than €50,000 in acquiring pre-1945 books and exhibition catalogues. No publisher responded when he proposed turning them into a book, he adds, so he put them on his site for free.

They contain many intriguing details. The Bergen painting, for instance, was displayed at the 1937 GDK – probably, it is suggested, as a counterpiece to another Bergen work depicting Germany’s naval bombardment of Almería during the Spanish Civil War, The German Pocket Battleship Admiral von Scheer Bombarding the Spanish Coast. This painting, it transpires, is held by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, one of seven accused of having been taken as war trophies (the museum did not respond to our request for comment).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/artists/nazi-art-truth-social/


Wikipedia entry on U-26:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-26_(1936)

 

[Grey Havoc]

I originally put this over in Naval Projects because the U-26 and her sister boat were in effect prototypes.